Islamabad court orders passports of KP CM Afridi and 24 PTI lawmakers blocked

An Islamabad anti-terrorism court on Monday ordered the Federal Investigation Agency to block the passports of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief minister Muhammad Sohail Afridi and 24 other Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf leaders and lawmakers. Judge Abul Hasnat Muhammad Zulqarnain issued the order on a police request. The investigating officer told the court the accused might leave the country to avoid the case.

The Express Tribune, which saw a copy of the order, said the judge wrote that the accused were implicated with heinous allegations regarding an attack on state institutions and advancing a terrorism cause. The FIR cited in that order is from Kohsar police station. Geo News dated the underlying protest to 26 November 2024. The court said some of the named people had taken interim bail and still had not joined the investigation.

The passports are to stay blocked until further orders. That is an interim restraint, not a conviction. It does stop official foreign travel while it lasts.

Who is on the list

Beside Afridi, the order covers former National Assembly speaker Asad Qaiser, Omar Ayub, Shahram Khan Tarakai, Junaid Akbar, Shahid Khattak, Zubair Wazir, Sher Ali Arbab, Muhammad Iqbal Afridi, Dr Amjad Ali, Provincial Assembly speaker Babar Saleem Swati, and a further string of MPAs and MNAs including Arshad Umarzai, Tufail Anjum, Asif Mehsud and Advocate Ali Zaman. Different outlets produced slightly different spellings. The common core is the sitting chief minister of KP plus a slab of the PTI legislature.

Afridi was in Punjab on Monday to campaign for a PTI protest called for 27 September. He said Punjab Police had tried to abduct him and had then left him on a roadside after assaulting him. That claim is his account, made the same day as the passport order, and it has not been independently settled in the reporting.

What the order does to provincial government

Blocking a sitting chief minister's passport is unusual even in Pakistan's long use of travel restrictions against opposition leaders. Afridi can still run the Peshawar secretariat. He cannot board an international flight on a Pakistani passport while the FIA complies with the order. For a party whose founder, Imran Khan, is already in prison, the move adds another layer of restraint ahead of the 27 September street calendar.

PTI will call the order political. The court text, as quoted, calls the underlying allegations an attack on state institutions. Those two sentences will now run in parallel until either the accused join the investigation or a higher court stays the block.

The practical watch items are narrow. Does the FIA enter the blocks in its system this week. Do any of the 25 names already hold second passports or foreign residence papers. Does the Islamabad High Court get a petition before 27 September. The protest date is the deadline that makes the order more than a routine ATC direction.